US Closes About 50 Overseas MissionsThe United States has closed about 50 of its overseas missions in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on Tuesday morning, the State Department said on Wednesday."There are 50-some, we don't have an exact count for you, 50- some of our embassies or consulates overseas that have felt it necessary to close," spokesman Richard Boucher said at a briefing. "We told embassies, told ambassadors to make these decisions based on their own local security requirements," he said. Boucher noted that "there is no particular threat, specific threats or warnings that we have for individual embassies or embassies as a whole." "But in this heightened security environment," he said, "we wanted everybody to look at their own procedures, decide if they were safe, and take appropriate precautions." |
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